Since 1910, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has inspired curiosity and learning about the natural world and our place in it.

Education

06/21/2011

Visitors to RACE: Are We So Different? at NMNH will see creative collaborations of a very personal nature: a set of four lockers, each holding an art installation made by students from DC schools.

Brenda Pérez adds a detail to the School Without Walls locker, as teammates Olivia Johnson, Adrian Espinola and Jahni Threatt look on. Image courtesy of C. Chen, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Lockers like these have been a part of the RACE traveling exhibition since it debuted at the Science Museum of Minnesota in 2007. The originals were made by students in St. Paul, but when planning for the exhibition's time here, we saw the lockers as an opportunity to highlight the talents of local students. With the help of schools, teachers, and parents, we reached out to four schools to ask them to create new lockers.

Each team began by reflecting on the same questions: What is race? What does race mean to you? Has your life been affected by race? Even for students immersed in the multicultural life of the District of Columbia, these were challenging questions.

A video in the exhibition says that “race” is a short word with a long history in the USA. Zainya Carter of CentroNia agrees, and thinks that this history is one thing that makes race tough to talk about now. “When you hear ‘race,’ at first, you don’t know what to say,” she notes. And trying to figure it out by yourself might not help much. “If you’re just one person working on it, you would have biases and certain ways of thinking that might create a one-sided view,” said Tessa Thomas of Bell Multicultural High School. Working with teachers, advisors, and other students gave each team the ability to create a unified response.

Flor Rivas, Mauricio Ventura, and Nelson Cruz of the CentroNia team get a little help with the installation of their artwork from Kim Moeller of the NMNH Exhibits staff (in blue sweater). Image courtesy of C. Chen, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

But they had to work hard to achieve that unity. It took time to create an artwork that would flow from each student’s contribution, but also represent a vision that came from the whole team. “The decision-making process—deciding what we wanted to put in the locker and what we wanted the locker to represent—was both my favorite part and the hardest part,” said Olivia Johnson of the School Without Walls. Deja Rinehart of Kimball Elementary School put it very eloquently: “When you talk about it, it’s easy. But when you do it, it’s really hard!” Students from all four teams agreed with her.

The students drew strength from their belief that art has a role to play in national conversations. “Art can be your own documentary,” said Dennis Lazo of CentroNia. Diana Castillo of Bell thinks that people should know that art is a universal resource for making sense of the world. Even if “they tell me that they don’t have the talent to make art, I think that every person can draw or paint or make a ceramic piece,” she says. Moreover, working as part of an artistic team builds a kind of unity that can translate to our whole society. Zainya Carter believes that her CentroNia team “wanted to show people that we do work together, and we can all create a great idea or a great project.” “Everyone should see the lockers,” Jahni Threatt from School Without Walls insisted, because they will help them understand the world in a very personal way.

Two members of the Bell Multicultural High School team, Moshood Salu and Tessa Thomas, assemble their locker. Image courtesy of by C. Chen, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

From the teachers’ point of view, the lockers have a clear set of messages. “People need to step out of thinking about themselves with a word—are you white, are you black, are you this, are you that,” said School Without Walls teacher Marni Leiken. CentroNia’s Director of Youth Programs, Kimberly Gaines, thinks that visitors will understand the lockers’ unifying statements. “We’re closer-knit than we actually think. We are more similar than we are dissimilar,” she believes. Bell art teacher Mandy McCullough thinks of her students’ problem-solving abilities as one of their greatest strengths, and that gives her great hope for the future. Kimball art teacher Eugene Foster feels the same way, and sees the lockers as a promising sign: “When they put together ideas like this, I think we’re going to be okay. And it feels amazing.”

RACE: Are We So Different? will be on view at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History from June 18, 2011 to January 2, 2012.

Members of the Kimball Elementary School team at work on their locker, titled “Flush the Foolishness”: Carl Goins, Michaela Brown, and Deja Rinehart. Image courtesy of C. Chen, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

David D. LaCroix, Programming and Volunteer Training Coordinator, Office of Education and Outreach

05/18/2011

The Museum’s fossil preparation facility, FossiLab, recently received a shipment of dinosaur fossils from northern Zimbabwe. They were collected last year by an international team of scientists, including NMNH Dinosaur Curator Matt Carrano.

The fossils, still largely encased in rock, are of two types of dinosaur. One, a small, primitive meat eater closely related to Coelophysis, was a member of the dinosaur group that eventually gave rise to huge predators like T. rex. These fossils were found in a “bone bed,” a place where the fossil remains of many individuals are mixed together. Coelophysis fossils have been found in other bone beds, most famously at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, and the new discovery may help scientists answer questions such as whether Coelophysis and related species lived in groups, and what events led to the death and burial of so many animals at once. The other Zimbabwean dinosaur is a prosauropod, a medium-sized plant eater that had a large claw on its thumb, a long neck, and leaf-shaped teeth for chopping plant matter. They seem to have been quite common at a time when the local environment was desert, and researchers wonder why.

The scientists discovered the fossils in a river canyon. During the rainy season, water courses through the canyon eroding its rock walls and uncovering fossils. Then, when the rains stop, the riverbed dries up and becomes a convenient path for scientists prospecting for newly exposed fossils – and for lions and elephants traveling through the bush.

Paleontologists are friendly, as a rule, but prospecting can be solitary work. Team members often spread out to cover as much territory as possible, and as they walk slowly along searching for fossils, they sometimes become oblivious to everything around them. Obviously, this is not the smartest behavior when large, possibly dangerous animals are nearby, so the team hired a local wildlife guide to keep them out of trouble. He coached them on what not to do when charged by lions (run), or elephants (stand still) and kept them bunched together in the relative safety of a “herd” as they prospected in the canyon.

The scientists found the tracks of several big cats as they worked in the riverbed, but, to their relief, they came face to face with only one group of predators -- dinosaurs, all safely fossilized.

Abby Telfer, FossiLab Manager, Paleobiology Department

Image captions and credits (top to bottom): At the Museum, a plaster and burlap field jacket holds a jumble of dinosaur fossils from the bone bed, including a jaw fragment with teeth (center). Photo by A. Telfer; Removing fossils from the canyon wall in Zimbabwe. Photo by M. Carrano; Leopard tracks in the dry riverbed. Photo by M. Carrano.

04/19/2011

One year ago, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico - endangering wildlife and ecosystems. Staff here at the Museum mobilized on the Museum floor and online to help visitors make sense of this event and its possible effects. Here are a few of these resources:

Left wondering where things stand today? Tune into tonight's webcasted panel discussion (click the flyer to the right for more information). If you can't watch tonight, keep an eye on our Facebook and Twitter pages for a link to the archived video.

04/06/2011

FossiLab volunteer Suzy McIntire projects the magnified image from her microscope as she hunts through matrix at the Museum. Image courtesy of A. Telfer.

Visitors to FossiLab, the fossil preparation laboratory in the ancient life halls of the Museum, see work that normally goes on behind the scenes at museums. They watch specially trained volunteers prepare fossils for scientific study, display, or storage in our enormous collections, and sometimes they witness exciting discoveries.

Most of the fossils we work on in FossiLab were found and excavated by Smithsonian paleobiologists (scientists who study ancient life), whose research takes them to remote places around the world. When the packing crates containing their discoveries arrive in FossiLab, we pull out our tools and get to work. Right now, we are cleaning T. rex foot bones, the skull of a brontothere (an extinct relative of horses and rhinos) embedded in a massive block of rock, and a couple of whale skulls. Removing all the rock from these behemoths is interesting and fun, but we often wish we’d been there when the fossils were discovered -- wouldn’t it be cool to be the first person to see something that had been buried in the earth for millions of years! That’s why we get so excited when we open a crate and find bags containing loose bits of broken-up rock, not “just another” T. rex bone. The lumps of sedimentary rock, or “matrix,” offer a chance to make fossil discoveries right here at the Museum!

When scientists go out prospecting for fossils, erosion is their best friend. Most of the “life” of a fossil is spent deep underground, encased in rock, and it is only after erosion slowly breaks apart the rock matrix covering it that a fossil can be discovered. Scientists searching for the fossil remains of big animals walk along eroding hillsides and look for bones protruding from the earth or for telltale bone fragments at the bottom of a slope. If they spot something that looks interesting, they remove the loose matrix and carefully trace the remains back into the hill, hoping to find more bone entombed in the rock.

Petrified Forest Expedition team member Amelia Villaseñor searches the ground for small fossils. Image courtesy of A.K. Behrensmeyer.

But paleobiologists don’t always go for the big stuff. All fossils provide important evidence about the history of life, ancient ecosystems and environments, and for some research, finding the fossils of tiny creatures becomes Job #1. Prospecting for small fossils requires enormous patience and keen observation, and some people are really good at spotting bits of tiny bones and teeth eroding from the same outcrops that hold the fossils of larger animals. That is when shovels fill canvas bags with as much broken-up matrix as the scientists can carry, and crates full of matrix make their way to back to the Museum.

In FossiLab, we have time to do a more thorough search of the crumbling matrix. We use a microscope so that we can see even the tiniest bones and teeth, and we don’t have to contend with the dripping sweat, too-bright sunshine, blowing dust, and cramped muscles that make it so difficult to spot small fossils out in the field.

Lately, we have been looking through matrix from Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, finding the pencil tip-sized teeth of very small reptiles, and even fragments of dinosaur teeth. This matrix was collected last spring by Museum paleobiologist Dr. Kay Behrensmeyer and her colleagues. The goal of their expedition was to find fossils of mouse-sized early mammals and evidence of the environments where they lived during the Late Triassic Period, more than 200 million years ago. Although the area was once wet and green, there is no water there today. The eroded badlands are so rugged, and the fossil-bearing rock outcrops so far from the road, that they had never been explored by paleontologists. Kay’s team solved the challenge of setting up camp near the outcrops by hiring Navajo wranglers from a nearby ranch to transport their gear and water on pack horses and mules. The scientists prospected and collected on the outcrop for nearly a week, and when the wranglers returned to help them pack out, bags of matrix began the journey to FossiLab tied to the saddle of a strong black mustang.

Now, new bits of interesting teeth and bones turn up regularly under the FossiLab microscope, while Museum visitors follow the fossil search in real time on a large TV screen. So far we’ve found no mammal fossils, but the other tiny teeth are providing lots of clues about life in Arizona during the Triassic – and the thrill of discovery at FossiLab.

03/15/2011

The 19th Annual Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital runs from March 15–27, 2011. The National Museum of Natural History has been a Festival partner since 1993 when the Festival was founded. We are pleased to present the following films and programs at the Museum as part of the Festival:

Thursday, March 177:00pm in Baird AuditoriumForce of Nature: The David Suzuki MovieDiscussion with David Suzuki and director Sturla Gunnarsson follows the film. Book signing by David Suzuki concludes the evening.

Friday, March 18 7:00pm in Baird AuditoriumLecture by E.O. Wilson focusing on his two recently published books, The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct and Kingdom of the Ants: José Celestino Mutis and the Dawn of American Natural HistoryQuestion and answer session and book signing by E.O. Wilson follows the lecture.

02/14/2011

Students from the Suquamish Tribal Early College High School, part of the Seattle Aquarium Delegation to the Third Student Summit on the Ocean & Coasts, are working on a project to raise community awareness of how ocean acidification impacts the Suquamish community–economically, environmentally, socially, and culturally. They will present their plans in Washington, D.C., tomorrow in a program that will be webcast live from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Learn more about the Student Summit and webcast, and enjoy their video!

01/19/2011

A week from tomorrow, three of our staff will take part in a free online event for students and teachers called Study the Land. Study the Land is the second in a six-part series connecting experts in environmental sciences with you and others around the world - both during these live webcasts and through ongoing connections with Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Network, the Smithsonian Institution, and TakingITGlobal's online community. Put together, this rich array of resources coalesces around themes about environmental responsibility known as “shouts.” These six themes – Live, Study, Change, Sustain, Value, and Celebrate - make up the Shout Learning Project, and as described on its website:

Shout gives participants a framework for success, with resources and tools for exercising social responsibility while building the 21st-century skills of collaboration, innovation, and critical thinking. When students are connected through technology and empowered to build activities in their own way the learning experience extends far beyond the four walls of a classroom ...take your own stand in making the world a better place. Now that’s something to Shout about!

The NMNH staff participating in this second “shout” come from our Botany Department and bring their expertise in a variety of areas including plant conservation, scientific illustration, and systematic biology. Explore their profiles linked below:

W. John Kress, Ph.D., is a Curator and Research Scientist, as well as the Director of the Smithsonian's Consortium for Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet, and Adjunct Professor at The George Washington University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Yunnan [link to his staff bio]

We hope you’re now brimming with questions and excited to join them on January 26th. Don’t forget! Registration is free and only takes a few seconds. Can’t watch it live? Watch the archive, follow the tweets, and join in their Facebook community. We hope to see you there and at future Shouts.